John Norton (Australian Journalist) - Life, Career and Controversy

Life, Career and Controversy

John Norton claimed to have been born in Brighton, Sussex, England but may have been born in London. He was the only son of John Norton, stonemason, who died before he was born, and his mother was Mary Davis. In 1860, his mother remarried Benjamin Timothy Herring, a silk-weaver, who allegedly mistreated his stepson. He apparently spent some time in Paris and learned to speak good French. He claimed to have walked to Constantinople in 1880, where he became a journalist.

Norton emigrated to Australia in 1884 and soon became chief reporter on the Evening News, which supported free trade. In 1885 he edited the official report of the Third Intercolonial Trades Union Congress. One of its resolutions condemned the New South Wales Governments contribution of ₤250,000 to assist migration from Europe. Norton was selected by the Trades and Labor Council of New South Wales to go to Europe in 1886 to tell potential immigrants that Australia was not a workers' paradise. He attended a trade union congress in Hull and spoke in French to one in Paris.

On his return, Norton became editor of the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners Advocate, but was sacked for drunkenness after a few months. Within a few weeks of its establishment in August 1890, he then joined the Truth, which favoured exposé articles. He soon became its editor and in April 1891 he altered its masthead to claim proprietorship, but was sacked as editor for repeated drunkedness.

He became the owner of the Sydney newspaper, The Truth in 1896 and it became even more abusive of public figures, leading to increased circulation and legal action including trials for criminal libel and sedition, which he generally managed to beat. He established editions of the Truth in Queensland, Victoria (The Truth) and Western Australia by 1903. Norton's staunchly nationalistic paper published many late-19th-century Australian authors such as Henry Lawson.

From humble beginnings, John Norton became one of Australia's most successful media figures, and he became fabulously rich. He and his family lived in huge mansion called St. Helena, situated at Torrington Road, Maroubra in Sydney's eastern suburbs.

The Grohn affair

In 1906, Norton was accused in the press of attempted murder. He became embroiled in a murder investigation regarding the death of a man named George Grohn (de Groen) who died in mysterious circumstances in John Norton's house on 9 November 1902. The men were both drunk on the night Grohn died and Norton gave evidence that George Grohn had died because he had accidentally fallen down the stairs, but the investigating police and others believed Norton had hit Grohn on the head with a bottle, killing him instantly. Norton was alleged to have organised a Randwick physician named Dr. Osborne H. Reddall to issue a death certificate stating Grohn had died of natural causes. It was also alleged that the death certificate was written out while Dr. Reddall was in The Truth's Sydney office - before the physician had even viewed the body. Norton held on to Grohn's death certificate for two years until he finally registered the death in 1904. These details emerged in 1906, and the police immediately requested that Grohn's death be investigated by the City Coroner. Grohn's body was exhumed from its grave at Rookwood Cemetery for an autopsy. The 1906 inquest into Grohn's death produced an open finding due to lack of medical evidence, but serious doubts over the incident always remained.

Wowser

John Norton is generally considered the person who invented the Australian word 'wowser', meaning one whose overdeveloped sense of morality drives them to deprive others of their pleasures; a person regarded as excessively puritanical; a killjoy. His name is mentioned as the inventor of this word in the Macquarie Dictionary.

"I invented the word myself," he wrote. "I was the first man publicly to use the word. I first gave it public utterance in the City Council, when I applied it to Alderman G.J. Waterhouse, whom I referred to as the white, woolly, weary, watery, word-wasting wowser from Waverley". Gustavus John Waterhouse (1850-1929) was the Mayor of Waverley on two occasions and was an Alderman on Waverley Council for many years.

The earliest occasion on which the word wowser appears in print in a newspaper in the National Library of Australia's Trove collection was in the Perth Sunday Times on 2 August 1903, on pages 1 and 10. It appeared on page 1 of the same newspaper on 30 August 1903. It seems not to have appeared in print before that time, but was common in that newspaper thereafter. It either travelled rapidly to W.A. and found fertile ground there, or it was originated in Western Australia.